Co-founder & CTO of clinical-stage antibody therapeutics co @IgGenix | Following trials with @trialinference | Previously @Stanford bioengineering PhD

Bay Area, CA
The brutally candid retrospective, "Lessons learned from the fate of AstraZeneca's drug pipeline", is an A+ read for anyone in biotech. Despite being over a decade old, there are timeless insights from their 5Rs framework: right target, right tissue, right safety, right patients, and right commercial opportunity. And as if the entire manuscript didn't drive home the challenges of drug development, they leave the reader with this sobering sentence in the concluding paragraph: "Our ambition is to achieve an overall success rate of at least 8% from preclinical GLP toxicology to launch." Link to the pdf from academia[.]edu below.
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"There's got to be some kind of machine that can do this" - Leonard Herzenberg, eyes tired from counting immunofluorescent cells under the microscope, subsequently invented the fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS) h/t @stanfordmag
starting a collection of quotes like this
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Speaking of, just this month in the Journal of Immunological Methods: "Of the twelve anti-human IgG2 clones tested, only three were found to be highly specific for IgG2" 😱 doi: 10.1016/j.jim.2026.114086
Replying to @draparente
I'm lucky to have worked with talented protein sciences teams that did heavy internal QC for any externally purchased proteins. They'd had enough bad experiences receiving unfolded/nonfunctional proteins, wrong PTMs, or the wrong protein entirely.
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I've added EU numbering of IgG constant regions to LAMBS in v0.12.0! LAMBS is free, local, open-source and now saves you the headache of deciphering EU numbering when engineering an antibody Fc. Shown is the pembro S228P mutation (mouseover yields variant in a popup)
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New blog post! I've been blogging for 10 years now and had a chance to reflect on why, including a throwback reference to MySpace, for those old enough to remember. derekcroote.com/2026/06/27/t…
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"Ballistic high-powered spider webs" launching ants at 140G is biology so wild it can only happen in one country and yes it's Australia. Catching it on video required shooting at 5000 fps!
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E. coli LLM next
Living cells can compute — no engineering required. 🦠 Our E. coli reservoir computer classifies COVID-19 severity & solves ML tasks from growth alone. New in Cell Systems: doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2026.…
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what happens after you "Export to Docs" in Google Gemini
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Give Trial Inference a try! It's free to begin analyzing the clinical landscape and tracking clinical trial updates.
Redesign complete! We think you'll really like the new aesthetic and recently added features, including a cleaner Map View and greater search flexibility. Trial Inference is free to try, so get started today.
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Incredibly exciting initiative tackling the pernicious problem of respiratory viruses
Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past. We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that. We heard two main reasons: (1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible. (2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained). We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot. We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street. And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.
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I'm curious: where have you used AI successfully outside of work? My list so far spans health, a children's book, car purchase negotiations, search replacement, plant identification and more. Maybe some will serve as inspiration! Full list with expanded details on my blog 🔽
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they weren't kidding about claude fable 5 blocking biology: 38/40 questions refused on my private eval!
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Nice to see Claude Opus 4.8 refusing fewer biology questions than 4.7. It's now also recognizing the error-prone nature of correctly reproducing long sequences: "I can't provide the exact full amino acid sequence of... as I'm not confident I can reproduce it with the precision required. Sequence data like this is the kind of information where small errors (a single wrong residue) can be significant, and I don't want to give you something that looks authoritative but contains mistakes."
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More journals should offer manuscripts in both human-readable PDF and machine-readable XML like @MDPIOpenAccess does.
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exceptional clinical trial title
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Derek Croote retweeted
Today we're publishing our index of unmet needs in human disease: 2443 indications scored and ranked on burden of disease, prevalence, pipeline activity, and treatment burden. We hope this will help drug developers identify overlooked medical problems convoke.bio/blog/introducing…
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